I compared stories of herding and tendering goats and donkeys with my friend sometime back. These stories rolled back in my mind recently in the light of how our public affairs have unfolded and are managed.
In 1969 a drought had hit Lesotho hard. When that happens the winter to spring months can be exceedingly dry and barren. The grazing gets depleted, and supplements for animals come in the form of sliced aloe. Cutting aloe is dangerous. Besides navigating the sharp spikes, snakes at the beginning of spring emerge out of hibernation. But the additional challenge is that we cut the aloe as we herded. I herded donkeys, and they get wild because spring is their prime mating season. A friend and I decided on a strategy to stop their disruption. The sharp sickles we used to cut the aloe came in handy. A few spikes on the body caused them to stand still, and we went about cutting aloe for cattle unhindered. Trouble started when we herded them back to the kraal. My father asked why the donkeys moved with difficulty. We said they jumped through the fence and the spikes of the barbed wire seem to have hurt them. The lie worked. My friend then countered my story with his. His grandmother caught them beating goats in the kraal. When she asked them why, they said the naughty goats have been running into the fields and devouring the crops. How can you punish these for something that happened days ago, how do you expect them to remember and behave? Their grandmother retorted. She instructed them to leave the goats immediately. I felt that spiking the donkeys immediately after their transgression, barbaric as it was, accorded with the advice of my friend’s grandmother.
Recently a deputy director-general was reinstated after the minister responsible had fired her instantly. At stake was that the minister was trapped in a lift for an hour. The public evidence is that the senior official had taken all the steps necessary for the technical staff to address the matter of the lift. But here is the story of the goat. The minister in taking the decision argued that every minister before her had accused the “goat” of transgressions and this was the right time to beat the hell out of the metaphorical goat. The labour court was scathing in its finding against the minister. It found that she had exceeded natural justice by not going through with the prescribed disciplinary hearing but instead choosing to be an investigator, prosecutor, judge and prison warder. Her beating of the “goat” because it was a habitual offender and doing so on behalf of other ministers who failed to beat it, was unreasonable, insensitive and violated basic precepts of natural justice.
While the Russian-Ukraine war has been painful, for South African citizens, this war unravelled the Trojan Horse that SA wrought unto itself and revealed the lemon that the just energy transition is as the West abandoned it unashamedly and headed to coal. SA was sold a nightmare that it swallowed hook, line and sinker, sink, hook, and line.
The matter of public interest goes into how under those circumstances the public purpose will continue to be served. The term of office for the senior official is three years before reaching retirement. That of the minister has a number of permutations. It could be anything between a year to six years depending on the outcome of the national election. If the national election acts in favour of her party, she has a prospect of facing her tormentor for two more years provided she returns to the same portfolio.
Another issue of public interest is one that moves in the opposite direction — praising the goat and forgetting to ask the right questions and risking the goat going without public scrutiny. For three years Eskom’s load-shedding has been on steroids. But in the past week, there has been a reprieve of two hours without load-shedding a day, leading to one pundit capturing the nation’s probable relief. She says: “For three consecutive days I have gone to bed with electricity, and I have woken up to lights being on. I am not naive and expect severe outages during winter. However, what is being done, long may it continue.” All well and good, but these words of appreciation miss public scrutiny. There cannot be so much destruction of public infrastructure and the goat is not immediately beaten. The closure of a well-functioning Komati with a thousand megawatts worsened the suffering, killed those on humidifiers as a life support system and annihilated livelihoods because of ineptitude and a nonsensical national agenda of the government. While the Russian-Ukraine war has been painful, for South African citizens, this war unravelled the Trojan Horse that SA wrought unto itself and revealed the lemon that the just energy transition is as the West abandoned it unashamedly and headed to coal. SA was sold a nightmare that it swallowed hook, line and sinker.
There is a Zulu idiom that says water will accumulate where it gathered before. So let us heed this wisdom lest those who let us down go scot-free and we suffer in perpetuity. We need to ask the question this positive baby step in electricity availability raises. Not to be taken for fools on hooves as voting cattle, we have to ask those in position of power the following questions as far as electricity load-shedding is concerned: what happened? Why did it happen? Was it necessary? What is the remedy? What is the reparation or atonement for losses in lives and livelihoods? Who is to be held responsible and accountable for the unnecessary? Finally, what are the lessons for policy, and how do we shape our policies so water does not accumulate where it did before. Otherwise, our prison warders may be taken for our liberators in this energy mess. Let the donkey be spiked with a sharp sickle and the goat should be beaten as it offends and not later when it has even forgotten it ever offended.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of SA.
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